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ORILLIA, ONT.—Controversy echoes from coast to coast with every toppling of yet another second-rate statue of a “problematic” figure from Canadian history. But few outsiders even noticed last year when the signature work of public art in the Ontario town of Orillia — a towering monument of dramatically posed bronze figures topped by French explorer Samuel de Champlain in full court dress, bestriding the New World like a Spanish Conquistador — quietly disappeared from the lakefront park it has dominated for most of a century.

Restoration was the reason for the removal, according to Parks Canada, the famous monument’s current owner. But only reconciliation can bring it back, and that is by far the tougher job. As the restored bronzes wait in storage, Orillia is quietly pioneering a new process to redress artistic offences against Canada’s First Nations constructively — not by “destroying history,” but by getting it right.

If the Champlain Monument ever does reappear on the shore of Lake Couchiching — not a safe bet at this point — it will do so in the context of a new memorial that tells a radically different version of the same story.

“Taking down monuments is not the way to rewrite history,” says Sherry Lawson, a 61-year-old elder, librarian and archivist with the Chippewas of Rama First Nation, located just north of Orillia. The Champlain Monument “is still a beautiful piece of sculpture,” she adds. “But it’s not the truth. Now we’re getting a chance to tell the truth.”

Lawson recalls her father bringing her to see the monument as a child, and quizzing her about what she saw. She remembers seeing “somebody on top with a sword and a hat and big tall boots.” Bronze figures of her awestruck ancestors huddled at his feet, “looking like they’re almost bowing down to the guy on top with the tall boots on.”

“Why are the Indians underneath everyone else?” the girl wondered.

A good question, her father replied. “Remember this day,” he advised, predicting that the time would come when the monument’s makers and their descendants would be forced to answer it.

Sharpening the obvious message of the triumphal grouping, an accompanying plaque — also now gone — said the monument had been erected in 1925 to “commemorate the advent of the white race into Ontario.” The same plaque also called it “a symbol of goodwill between the French and English speaking people of Canada” — a gesture of reconciliation between groups previously divided by the issue of conscription in the First World War.

But true to the imperial age that conceived it, this symbol of goodwill rested almost literally on a foundation of contempt for untold generations of people who had occupied these shores for thousands of years before the fateful “advent.”

The initiative to correct the record with a counter-monument reflecting the Indigenous view of that event originated with the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, whose members voted unanimously last year to donate $25,000 to “address the bias and insensitivity of the current monument and to demonstrate our support for the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”

The Rama First Nation responded by recruiting two young Indigenous artists to make proposals. But the prospect of the original monument appearing in any new context alarmed members of the Huron-Wendat Nation, direct descendants of the people depicted on the monument.

Writing to Orillia Mayor Steve Clarke this spring, Huron-Wendat Grand Chief Konrad Sioui called the monument “degrading and preposterous,” and argued strongly against its reinstallation.

“Not only would such an action undermine and challenge reconciliation efforts with Indigenous Peoples,” Sioui wrote, “but it would also perpetuate a disgraceful perception of our Peoples as being submissive, subservient and obedient to the French Crown, while portraying them as an inferior class of citizens.”

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Shortly after, Parks Canada indefinitely postponed the monument’s reinstallation, which had been previously scheduled to take place this summer. But the hope for reconciliation lived on: Last month, Orillia struck a committee, including representatives from the town, the ETFO and both the Rama and Wendat First Nations, to wrestle with the question of the Champlain Monument’s future.

One irony of the artwork as originally conceived is that it defames the explorer almost as much as his native hosts. Horrified by the exploitation of native people he had witnessed on a trip to Spanish America, Champlain in Canada consciously enacted a policy of mutual respect that was remarkable for its time.

He entered Huronia as a supplicant, seeking allies in an effort to save his infant colony from destruction at the hands of the Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee.

When Champlain was wounded in a battle south of Lake Ontario, his Wendat allies carried him to safety in a basket. They wisely overruled his desire to return to Quebec and forced him to return to their homeland instead, where he spent the winter enjoying their hospitality. None of them would recognize the high-booted conquistador who lately stood atop his plinth at Mnjikaning, the traditional name for the narrows between two lakes where Orillia now sits.

“Champlain would have sat with us at our fire,” Sherry Lawson says. “We would have welcomed him into the village, and we would have fed him. We would have told him who we were, and about how long we’ve been here.”

Carbon dating has shown that the some of the stakes used to construct an ancient fish weir at the narrows are 7,500 years old, making Mnjikaning the oldest continuously settled place yet discovered in Canada. “We’re older then the pyramids,” Lawson says.

Not that such a favoured place stayed in Indigenous hands after the 1867 establishment of both Orillia and modern Canada. Pushed off to an infertile borderland, the local Chippewa entered a long decline that left four out of five unemployed, suffering from a fate that was once universal among First Nations in Canada.

But the fortunes of the Rama First Nation made another abrupt turn when they opened the first large-scale Indigenous-run casino in the country. More than 20,000 people a day now stream through the doors of Casino Rama, and its landlords have emerged from poverty to become the largest employers in the region.

In the symbolic language of the Champlain Monument, “we were the ones that needed help,” Lawson says. “But we now know that we are a long-lived, competent people. We’ve survived despite everything that’s been thrown at us. We’re still here, and we’re not just surviving but thriving.”

Orillia’s committee is scheduled to begin meeting this fall and to make a recommendation in the spring about the fate of the monument and any potential interventions or additions to the ensemble — a task far more challenging than pulling things down and boxing them up. But this is how mainstream Canada inches towards reconciliation.

“You have to make peace with history,” Lawson says. “Sometimes that’s messy, sometimes it’s painful. But you still have to admit what happened – and what continues to happen. Only then can we begin to move forward, walking side by side.”

John Barber is a freelance journalist and author of Day Trips Around Toronto.

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